Category: Main Course

Authentic spaghetti carbonara

Veronica 1 Comment

Tagliatelle carbonara
OK, it’s tagliatelle, home-made from excess sourdough starter. I generally don’t have spaghetti in the house as it’s far from my favourite pasta shape. I’m just back from a trip to northern Italy and on our last evening I ventured to order spaghetti carbonara. It was divine. We make a version of it quite often at home (never order it in a restaurant in France. You will get a pile of lukewarm pasta slathered in cream and piled with lardons and cheese, plus a raw egg yolk in half an eggshell perched on top).

Anyway. This experience prompted me to stop in at a deli the next day and buy some guanciale (dry-cured pork cheek), which according to purists is the only meat you should use for carbonara. Maybe pancetta at a pinch, certainly not bacon. I can now confirm this is true, having made it for lunch today. Admittedly I had forgotten to buy any pecorino cheese, so I used Parmesan. If you can get hold of pecorino, do. The restaurant used a soft fresh pecorino grated over the top; I’m not sure if this is truly authentic or a northern Italy quirk.

Anyway. This is now my definitive recipe, though we’re unlikely to do it this way every time. Dieters look away now: guanciale is very fatty, at least 50% fat I reckon. You cook it slowly in its own fat in a frying pan till crispy, ending up with a lake of rendered fat. Then you tip the cooked pasta into the frying pan and stir it around thoroughly to make sure that pasta picks up every last drop of porky, cholesterol-laden fat. It tastes amazing and is what helps the sauce to cohere and coat the pasta properly. It’s completely different from making it with a lesser pork product. As for Jamie Oliver with his “carbonara” with sausages in it, he can get in the bin.
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Kedgeree

Veronica 2 Comments

Kedgeree
This dish was one of my very regular standbys when I was a student: cheap, filling, nourishing. I always followed Delia Smith’s recipe, published in the Evening Standard in the mid-70s. I haven’t made it for years, mainly due to the impossibility of finding Finnan haddock in France. I got it once in Grand Frais a few years ago, but now they only seem to have French-produced bright yellow smoked haddock (a Brexit effect?). Still I decided to try it, and it’s a lot better than it looks. It doesn’t stain everything else bright yellow, and the actual flesh is white, albeit a tad over-salted.

So here’s the recipe. You can use other hot-smoked fish: kippers for example, or Arbroath smokies.
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“Asian” salad

Veronica 1 Comment


I think I could live on Spanish salads, at least in the summer months. They’re always so colourful, and usually include protein and a bunch of vitamins, with different textures and a balance of sweet and sharp. Fruit often features, especially on the Costa Tropical, where avocados and mangos are a major crop.

I’ve already featured ensalada tropical; this salad is one we had in our favourite restaurant, which describes it as “ensalada asiatica”. It doesn’t seem that Asian to me; I guess it’s because it features Thai sweet chilli sauce. This is Steve’s first attempt at replicating it, and it was a little on the sweet side; next time about half of the mango will be replaced with slices of orange, so that’s how I’ve written the recipe. It was absolutely delicious though. I’m normally ambivalent about prawns but these were amazing; I am a convert now.

The basic recipe is below; adjust quantities and proportions according to taste, and you don’t need to include all the elements as long as there’s a good balance of crisp, soft, sweet and sharp. Needless to say everything should be perfectly ripe. If you can’t get miel de caña (a very local product), pomegranate molasses or maybe reduced balsamic vinegar would be good substitutes.

We eat this as a starter, but you could make it a light main course.
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Cheeseboard tart

Veronica 2 Comments


After inviting friends for dinner we often find ourselves with a large amount of surplus cheese. On this occasion I was home alone with not much in stock for dinner other than a couple of eggs and the deteriorating remains of a week-old cheeseboard. So it was a pleasure to stumble across Rosie Birkett’s recipe in the Guardian a couple of days ago for precisely this situation — I had all the ingredients on hand except for pickled onions. It was so good I’m recording my slightly adapted version here in case the online version disappears. Gorgeous bubbling, gooey cheese, with a crunch and a bit of acidity added by celery and cornichons. A salad would be good with it.

You can use any cheese you have, hard or soft. I had no soft cheeses, but I had a couple of stubs of Pyrenean tomme, some Morbier, and an unidentified but fairly mild blue cheese.
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Smoked haddock Monte Carlo

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I first encountered this delicious dish in a cookbook called The Recipes That Made A Million, by Franco Lagatolla, published in 1978. Lagatolla ran a few swanky Italian restaurants in the smartest parts of London in the 1960s. There is lots of name-dropping featuring the likes of Princess Margaret, Gregory Peck, and Frank Sinatra. The fact that I still have it after multiple house moves is testament to the fact that it has some really good traditional Italian recipes in it. The beef olives for one, and an amazingly good albeit labour-intensive lasagne featuring meatballs with pine nuts, sultanas, and lemon zest in them.

This recipe is clearly not traditional Italian, but it’s one of the most sauce-stained pages in the book. I hadn’t made it for many years, decades even, due to lack of proper smoked haddock in France. Of course when I did buy some, I wasn’t at home but in the UK, so I recreated the recipe based on my memory and a bit of googling. Hence this is a bit different from the original but just as good, and quite easy to make. Well, if you don’t count the poached eggs, which must be proper ones, not done in an egg poacher. Cheffy hint: poach them in advance, set aside in a bowl of warm water, and have a pan of boiling water ready to reheat them for 30 seconds when you are ready to serve.

I didn’t measure anything, so quantities are vague depending on how many people you are feeding. Start with the assumption of about 200 g of haddock per person and work from there. No photo either, sorry!

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La tarte à l’oignon de Caroline

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Onion tart

Another recipe courtesy of a cooking lesson from a neighbour. I have previously known this as Alsatian onion tart, a concoction of slowly cooked onions, cream, an egg, and grated cheese. Caroline’s version is vastly superior; she skips the egg, saying that adding egg means it’s “just a quiche”. And she caramelises the onions slightly and spices it with cayenne and paprika, which make all the difference. Easy to do, and really delicious served lukewarm with a glass of chilled rosé.
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Tatin d’aubergines de Sandrine

Veronica 4 Comments

Aubergine tatin

A neighbour who is renowned for her superb aubergine tart kindly submitted to pressure to reveal her secrets in an informal cookery lesson, held outdoors on a sunny day. We produced five magnificent tarts, which were shared along with glasses of chilled rosé. I will happily make these for guests, as a substantial starter or light main course.

Beyond the aubergines and tomato sauce, you can vary the other ingredients according to taste and whether you need it to be vegetarian. We used combinations of chopped black olives, chorizo, and anchovies. I think blobs of onion confit or pesto could be good as well. For the cheese, we used slices of a log of goat’s cheese. But you could substitute other soft cheeses: feta, mozzarella, sheep’s cheese …

White aubergines

Other ingredient notes: Sandrine recommends white aubergines; she thinks they are sweeter and more tender. She normally uses her own home-made passata for the tomato sauce, but you can use bought passata or pasta sauce instead. Likewise, for the pastry, either make shortcrust or buy it ready-made. Don’t use puff pastry though, it is too fatty for this recipe.
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Pride of the Punjab

Veronica 2 Comments

I got a Label Rouge free-range chicken on special offer, only 7 euros, and decided I fancied a change. Suddenly I remembered a recipe from an ancient Josceline Dimbleby book, one of those little ones they used to sell in Sainsbury’s in the 1980s, for, I think, 50p. A Traveller’s Tastes, it’s called, and it’s divided into sections of half a dozen recipes from different parts of the world. She has been pretty much forgotten now (try Googling her to see what I mean, the results are scanty). But most pages of this book are spattered with sauces and other ingredients — I used to use it a lot. See also … this blanquette still features on our menu regularly over thirty years after I bought the book. This is another of her recipes that deserves a wider audience.

This recipe is from the “India and Burma” section. Unusually for an Indian recipe, it features a whole chicken. It’s easy to do and the sauce is deliciously aromatic. I serve it with simply boiled Basmati rice; a green vegetable is a good idea too. Get started early because it needs to marinate for at least an hour.
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Pasta ai funghi

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Pasta and mushrooms
I already have a go-to pasta and mushrooms recipe, but Felicity Cloake’s “perfect” version looked intriguingly different, so I gave it a try. I can recommend it — more fiddly to make, but it has an interestingly complex flavour. I adapted it a bit — she recommends whizzing the dried mushrooms to a powder and using it as a thickener, but that seemed like a recipe for grit in your sauce. Instead I soaked them and then chopped very small, and used the water (minus grit!) in the sauce. Also I used a herby white vermouth rather than the white wine or sherry she recommends and I think this really helped the flavour. I used dried tagliatelle, but I think this is a sauce that would go really well with fresh.
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Espinacas con Garbanzos: spinach and chickpeas

Veronica 3 Comments

Spinach and chickpeas

This is a classic Seville tapa: every bar has a version of it. It might not sound exciting, but you will never regret trying it. It’s delicious and much healthier than the many deep-fried or meat-heavy tapas available. Suitable for vegans as well as vegetarians. We don’t often have it as a tapa at home — it makes a great light lunch or first course, with some flatbread. I use the recipe from my favourite Spanish cookbook, Anya von Bremzen’s The New Spanish Table, which I can’t recommend too highly.
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